Rachel Reeves’ plans will boost UK but it will take a long time

Plug that in to the City and to the Nobel Prize winners at Google’s AI firm DeepMind and the biomedical research centre Crick Institute in Kings Cross, and the country would have a stunning global asset in the 21st Century economy.

Putting money into an integrated grand development plan connecting two of the world’s greatest centres of learning, involving housing, labs, offices, hospitals, reservoirs, roads and rail, is a no brainer for the world’s biggest investors.

This has long been dreamed of, but the reality is that Britain has severely restricted the growth of its most compelling world-beating technological and economic assets. That appears to end here with Reeves’ plans.

Successive governments have simply failed to deploy their political capital to ram through growth-enhancing changes such as Heathrow expansion and especially the potential Golden Triangle of future growth between Oxford and Cambridge.